That is also my favorite map, because Voronoi territory evaluation is so often wrong on it. Also I love that it is essentially never drawn. That map would be a great one for the finals, or perhaps an even bigger version of it to even more defeat search and mandate strategic understanding. I believe that I have an improved evaluation that will win this board against those using Voronoi, but perhaps it is so slow that it will not improve over a dumb evaluation with a fast search. Tricky indeed.

Fast search can bail one out from not having a good long-distance heuristic. I would second including a larger version of this in the tournament, While I haven't figured out the solution, I suspect that a bot that can handle a large version of this problem AND still outperform at the other maps is an objectively stronger player.

Although my bot performs well on other maps (Not the current version, that one has a bug which I haven't found yet, so it always commits suicide once the players are separated...), I had a lot of problems on this one. It really is a pretty cool map, but I just always lost on it even though I was on rank 3 two days ago. I'm working at a new evaluation which should be better at this map, but it's still buggy, so I'm losing all the time right now.

Quadrant was definitely tough for me too. I'm glad to see some of the new small maps, like oval and box, seem to favor similar strategies as this map. It makes working on a general heuristic to choose between turtling and rushing seem like a worthwhile endeavor, whereas previously, rushing was almost always the best idea.

I haven't got my bot to the point of uploading it yet, but even with the minimax algorithm it seems to calculate deep enough to work out what to do in this map, not sure how it would go on a larger version of the map though..